To Örebro University

This article explores viewers’ experiences of the Swedish Public Service (SVT) ‘slow TV’ broadcast Den stora älgvandringen (The Great Moose Migration), aired as a three-week long, live, multi-platform programme since 2019. Through semi-structured interviews with key informants, the aim is to qualitatively under- stand the audience attraction to the 24/7 programme, especially when it comes to authenticity, affordances and its apparent slowness of pace. The study showcases a spectrum of audiences’ experiences, ranging from appreciating the programme’s serenity and stillness to its potential for unexpected drama. It is suggested thatThe Great Moose Migration offers a ‘direct’ link to Swedish nature as it enables awallowing in Swedish landscapes and fauna, and allows for an unashamed adora- tion of the majestic Swedish moose, but without it being experienced as something particularly ‘Swedish’. It is found that authenticity is central to the programme’s success with both production team and audiences. However, both personal and sociable experiences of the programme as authentic rest on the collective accept- ance of authenticity as something intrinsically produced by people and technolo- gies yet not experienced as constructed. Rather, it is something that hovers in between experienced mediated and unmediated reality.

Capitalist enterprises continuously push consumption of commercial products on children, for instance in the form of transmedial worlds in which multiple stories can play out across media and over time. The popular Swedish children's franchise Bamse has undergone an obvious capitalist expansion over time, with more and more commodities being made available for purchase. At the same time the brand continues to be promoted as a force for spreading good values and thus provides a valuable service to its audience of Swedish children. The present article explores, through a combination of paratextual analysis and political economy, how these inculcative and commercial goals coexist in a tense but seemingly functional configuration.

This study examines the construction of media literacy in a special issue on source criticism of the Swedish children's comic Bamse - Varldens Starkaste Bjorn [Bamse - The World's Strongest Bear]. This is done with the purpose of understanding what values, perspectives, and practices are promoted when media literacy is communicated via children's edutainment media. Using narrative and discourse analysis, we problematise how notions of truth (such as post-truth) guide much of the discourse on digital media in today's post-political society, and how that and individualisation shape notions of media literacy. This is visible in the analysed case in how source criticism is constructed in relation to notions of truth and falsehood, and as moral lessons aimed at the individual media user. We argue that such an individualised, decontextualised, and depoliticised take on media literacy is problematic and an expression of neoliberalism and a middle-class gaze.

This article uses the concept of intermediality to explore four different adaptations, across three different media, of the infamous supervillain the Joker. Independent of the medium representing him, a recurring practice is to have the Joker engage with media technologies. Television, in particular, is often used, as in the cases discussed here: Tim Burton's film Batman (1989) and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), the comic book Batman: Death of the Family (2014), and the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009). Understood as media combination, intermedial referencing (Rajewsky (2005) Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality. Intermedialites 6: 43-64), and through concepts such as contingency and liveness (Doane (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press), these intermedial moments, by way of emphasizing the materiality and temporality of media, are found to promote immersion while simultaneously causing tension by destabilizing the act of viewing.

In the montage of archival and original material that makes up John Akomfrah's three-channel video work Vertigo Sea (2015), the frequent use of footage shot by BBCs Natural History Unit (producers of series like Planet Earth) stands out as an unusual choice. This article explores aesthetic-political implications of how this material is subtly repurposed, with focus on one of the interconnected issues dealt with in the work: nature and the Capitaloscene. What does Vertigo Sea do to and through these BBC nature images? Which artistic strategies are involved and for which ends? Is the kind of ecological pathos already framing the original material itself critically transformed and if so in which senses? Does Vertigo Sea merely go for a reproduction of the natural beauty often attributed to original material, and as simply juxtaposed with terrible images, or does the repurposing also entail an alteration of the very notion of natural beauty? This article critically explores all these questions mainly through the frameworks of Situationist detournement, Deleuze's ideas about art and cliches, and Adorno's notions of authentic art, re-enchantment, and natural beauty-frameworks that are conversely critically discussed through Vertigo Sea. It aims to reveal Vertigo Sea as on the one hand an experiment in finding vital artistic strategies for re-enchanting (in non-idealizing ways) planetary nature in the Capitalocene, and as on the on the other hand a thematization of the difficulties in doing so. While appearing among a contemporary art scene increasingly concerned with local and/or global relations having to do with ecology in this new era, Vertigo Sea presents us with a highly original case primarily through its unusual choice of main source material and its complex treatment of this material.

This paper explores medial relationships actualized by various media representations of DC Comics’ famous supervillain, the Joker. A recurring trope in Joker narratives, going back to his very first appearance in DC Comics Batman #1 (1940), involves him using media to spread his brand of terror across Gotham City. While the previous research on the Joker has sometimes noted the character’s transmedial travels, none has dealt extensively with the recurring placement of him in relation to specific media technologies and formats. Further, as such the character is an exemplary case for contributing to the contemporary discourse on intermediality. The present paper argues that the Joker exemplifies how intermedial references (c.f. Rajewsky, 2005) can simultaneously cue a sense of immersion and have a destabilizing effect on the actual experience of spectatorship. The analyses put emphasis on moments of what Tina Kendall (2010) has called “a spatial and temporal layering of representational forms” (190), which here specifically refers to moments when the Joker is represented on, in, or alongside television.